Called A Report to the President on Enhancing the Resilience of the Internet and Communications Ecosystem Against Botnets and Other Automated, Distributed Threats, the 51-page-long material notes the range of threats for which botnets can be created and used, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, spewing out spam, and spreading malware. It goes on to spell out several themes that underlie the problem and help explain its magnitude:

Based on the various facets of the botnet menace, the report identifies five goals that are intended to help mitigate the risk of attacks unleashed by botnets and to make the internet ecosystem more resilient.What have devices got to do with it?
A large portion of the report deals with edge devices, which it defines as “personal computers, mobile devices, edge servers, and IoT and other connected devices” and which can act as both the sources and victims of attacks.

The report came out at a time when it emerged that hundreds of thousands of routers had been compromised with malware dubbed VPNFilter, which prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to recommend that the owners of small office and home office routers should reboot the devices.